Zemismart Zigbee Battery Powered Roller Blind Motor

Anyone else have these? They seem to be different from the wall-powered Tuya/Zemismart roller blinds in that they come with this little "zigbee converter" thing, it doesn't seem like you connect directly to the roller motor.

I'm currently using them through Home Assistant's Tuya integration, but considering pulling my HE back out if it can connect and control them locally.

I’m not sure this will help, but give it a look.

Admirably, Jason is keeping a low profile here with this integration. It’s direction is HE to HA, but if you want HE to be the brains and HA to host the device, and the need is simple enough ( like On/Off, open/close, etc), then you can just create a simple real device to virtual device automation in HA to link the device back to HE for Rule Machine automation.

Thanks but connecting HE to HA isn't my issue. It's getting these battery powered Zigbee roller shades working.

So the HA integration is not local?

Correct. It uses the Tuya api

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Is it this one?

Do they pair with HE? If so, one of the reviews mentions a custom driver for smartthings. Have you gotten a hold of that to see if it can be ported?

No these. The photo is misleading because it comes with a little USB dongle that seems to be the actual Zigbee device.

I've been having trouble getting the dongle to pair with HE, but haven't tried extensively. I got it to pair with HA, but it just shows up as a Zigbee router.

So hard to decipher things on AliExpress. This looks like they are including a Zigbee hub and that it is connecting to the shade. So the Zigbee radio is in the shade and the hub.

So try to pair the Shade with Hubitat and forget trying to join that hub with Hubitat as that’s not going to work.

Been chatting with @gassgs, and I think the little "hub" module is actually the only component that's zigbee, and I think it's sending RF signals to the motor. I've ordered a Sonoff RF Bridge and am going to try sending RF signals directly to the motor and bypass the little hubs.

Hmm, maybe. From a cost perspective, it may have been less expensive to do it that way since building a battery powered Zigbee receiver with very low power drain isn’t easy. IKEA seem to have achieved that, but I haven’t seen many other examples that are not also IKEA (Third Reality switches are the only other ones that come to mind)

However, can you confirm there is no pairing button on the shades themselves? In these photos, they sure do make it look like you can use their Zigbee hub to communicate directly with the shades. For them to include a mini Zigbee bridge and then suggest you add a Zigbee hub as well is odd. But it’s not out of the realm of possible scenarios. Chinese manufacturers have some very unique approaches to issues.

There is definitely a button on the motor itself too. However, as far as I can tell it's only used to set or reset limits. I tried all the usual combinations of button presses/holds to get it to pair to zigbee on HA, and couldn't.

I know the language on these instructions probably doesn't mean much, but they do specifically call the little USB dongle a "Zigbee converter". And it does specifically say you need to use a Tuya Zigbee Gateway (hub).

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Seems like it may indeed be either a proprietary radio or 433MHz between the transmitter and the shades. However, sometimes I’ve found I can better interpret the meaning of the English that Google translate gives me, rather than a written In English translation from the manufacturer. Point your phone at the Chinese instructions (if included) and see what they say versus the provided translation.

Really interested in whether this Zemismart Blind Motor can be integrated into Hubitat as well! Watching!

This is a good resource for devices that work with the open source zigbee implementations (Zigbee2MQTT, etc) and how to pair things for some devices but not this one.

Supposedly Zigbee2MQTT supports it so there might be some information in the code for Zigbee2MQTT or the discussions on their GitHub.

That's a different model. The wall-powered ones don't have the same little Zigbee usb dongle

Following up on this. I haven't made much progress. I got a Sonoff RF Bridge, but then looked at the back of the RF Remote that came with the motor and realized it's 915Mhz, not 433Mhz, so the Sonoff won't work.

Anyone know of a 915Mhz compatible RF bridge?

Edit: Reading now that Zigbee itself can be 915Mhz...now I'm really confused about how these motors work.

Well, heck. Thanks to a nudge from @gassgs, I tried pairing the Zigbee "converter" dongles again and it worked!

Then, I set the device driver to this one from @joaomf hubitat/Zemismart Vertical Blind.groovy at master · joaomf/hubitat · GitHub and everything works! Even position settings!

Since I'm on Home Assistant now and just using my HE as a controller for certain devices like these that don't cooperate well with HA, I've connected HE to HA with the Hubitat integration, and to my complete shock everything (including the position settings) works flawlessly on Home Assistant.

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That's awesome! Thanks for the update. Are there any special instructions to pair the Zigbee 'converter'?

Just to confirm, this is the unit you are using:

No that's not what I'm using. I'm using these roller shade motors: Zemismart Tuya Zigbee 3.0 Roller Shade Motor with Battery For 38mm Tube Smart Life APP Control ALexa Google Home Control|Automatic Curtain Control System| - AliExpress

For anyone trying to get the converter dongle to pair:

  • plug in the dongle to a powered USB port
  • wait around 2 minutes for the blue LED to go off
  • press and hold the dongle set button with a pin until the blue led flashes once, then let go. it will be in pairing mode now

Oh darn! Do you think the one I posted would also pair? Probably based off of similar hardware?